Civilization is one of those long-running franchises that I’ve never really taken a crack at before. It’s got that… reputation to it, the one where you start playing at 8 PM with the goal of getting in just one or two turns before you go on to more productive uses of your evening, and the next thing you know the sun is peeking through the windows and you’re inventing another new illness to call in sick with.

It didn’t get me QUITE that badly, but it came pretty close. I had at least one four-hour session that I SWEAR did not feel like I’d been playing for more than an hour.

It’s a pretty dangerous game is what I’m saying.

Fortunately, I don’t think I have the patience to give it another go any time in the near future. I played through on the easiest difficulty level and the smallest map, and by the time my Cossack hordes were dropping nuclear bombs on the forces of Attila the Hun I was honestly pretty fed up with world conquest. If I DO play another game of it, I’m going to stick to a half dozen cities or less and work on one of the non-combat win conditions – managing twenty or thirty cities across the world just got tedious after a while and it might be fun to do more trading and espionage instead of just rolling over enemy cities (read: everyone else) and taking their stuff.

It did prove again that the Mac Mini I upgraded to a few months back is perfectly capable of handling itself when it comes to gaming, too – loading times were a little rough but it didn’t break a sweat otherwise.